Bignall and colleagues used a new technique known as 'Earth-Orbit Synthesis' which allowed them to get a detailed look at distant twinkling objects such as quasars. Believed to be galaxies with powerful black holes at their core, they are so far away that little is known about them. One of the questions of interest to Bignall and her colleagues is how the energy is channelled out from the black hole.

Current telescopes tend to see quasars as simply a point of light in the sky - the point that is believed to be the part of the quasar that releases the energy. The new technique enables resolution of detail 10,000 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope, and 100 times finer detail than can be seen by any other current techniques in astronomy. It is so powerful, it is the equivalent of being able to see a sugar cube on the Moon.

The principles of the method, which uses a very narrow band of radio waves (between 3 and 30 cm in length), were first proposed in 2002 by Australian researchers Dr Jean-Pierre Macquart, then at the University of Sydney (now of the University of Groningen in The Netherlands) and Dr David Jauncey of the Australia Telescope National Facility, the radiophysics division of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation.

The method relies on atmospheric turbulence - a similar phenomenon to that which causes stars to twinkle. Stars get brighter and dimmer according to which section of the Earth's atmosphere their light is passing through. Some parts of the atmosphere will focus the starlight and magnify it like a lense, while other parts will scatter it and cause it to appear dimmer.

Similarly, the radio waves from distant quasars get brighter and dimmer as they shine through moving clouds of charged interstellar gas in our galaxy.

While the twinkling of quasars was thought previously to be an intrinsic property of quasars, observations by Bignall and colleagues - using the CSIRO's Australia Telescope Compact Array, a group of six 22-metre dish antennas about 500 km northwest of Sydney - have found otherwise.

The team tracked the changes in brightness of a particular fast-twinkling quasar called PKS 1257-326, which is around 4 million light-years from Earth. They found that the twinkling pattern had an annual cycle, which corresponded to the movement of the Earth and the interstellar gas clouds.

The interstellar gas clouds moves at around 30 km per second, and Earth moves around the Sun at 25 km per second. For six months of the year, the gas clouds are in synchronicity with the Earth, and for six months they are going in opposite directions.

When they are in sync (during the southern hemispheric winter) the twinkling is slower; when they are moving in opposite directions (during the southern summer), the twinkling is faster.

"You end up with this beautiful signature of the rotation of the Earth that tells us that the twinkling is associated with us and our own galaxy," Jauncey told ABC Science Online. "This is proof that the twinkling we see is 'not in our stars, but in ourselves'," he added, quoting the Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

The conclusion that quasars do not twinkle themselves is the first step in understanding more about these distant objects, but nevertheless important enough for Jauncey to describe it as a 'paradigm shift'.

The researchers were able to relate the twinkling of the quasar to its shape. When they compared the twinkling of two different radio frequencies they found the same pattern, only time delayed. "This suggests that the quasar is in a line," said Jauncey. "And emission of energy from the black hole is more like that from a hose not a sprinkler."